Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JTRS) are a family of software defined radios that provide military users with voice, data and video communications as well as interoperability across the joint battle space. Such systems may be deployed in airborne platforms as well as selected maritime, fixed-station, and ground mobile platforms. The JTRS software defined radio (SDR) concept is built upon the use of modern object oriented distributed computing using the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) to define an open standard architecture for distributed execution of waveform software. The SCA governs the structure and operation of the JTRS, enabling programmable radios to load waveforms, run applications, and be networked into an integrated system. The term waveform refers to all of the characteristics and behaviors of a particular radio communication protocol. In an SDR, the implementation of a particular waveform is by software instructions executing on programmed digital signal processors and general purpose processors. Each SDR may store these software programs in memory, and may at any time dynamically load the desired waveform program and configuration into the receiver and transmitter channels.
In order to perform the desired waveform generation and processing, encryption, signal processing and major communication functions, JTRS platforms have traditionally included processors that are large enough to accommodate the most complex waveforms. This approach is limited by its lack of scalability. For example, the worst case waveform may be several times more difficult and computationally intense than the more typical waveform, however, the same amount of power is consumed for simple waveform generation and processing as for the most complex.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for implementing a scalable SCA operating environment such that waveforms ranging from relatively simple to very complex may be executed on a processing platform that could scale to meet the computing and power consumption demands.